Drumgoold, Kate

Source:

 African American National Biography

Drumgoold, Kate

(Aug. 1858–after 1900),

author and teacher, was born into slavery near Petersburg, Virginia. According to her narrative, which remains the source of most of her biographical information, Drumgoold lived with her mother and sisters until her mother was sold south in 1861. Cared for by her mistress Bettie House—whom she referred to as her “white mother”—for three years, Drumgoold was reunited with her real mother near the end of the Civil War. In 1865 the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they joined the Reverend David Moore's Washington Avenue Baptist Church. Drumgoold, already working as a domestic, was baptized in 1866. Through the church, she gained basic literacy skills, and through work with a kind boardinghouse keeper, Lydia A. Pousland, as well as summer work in Saratoga Springs, she attained some level of economic security. Still, her domestic work was repeatedly interrupted by illness, and she felt a growing desire for further education.

After recovering from an extended bout with smallpox, Drumgoold moved to Washington, D.C., in 1875 to attend Wayland Seminary, which she was able to attend through the financial support of her Washington Avenue Church. After almost four years at Wayland, she began teaching in rural Virginia and West Virginia. Apart from what seems to have been a brief return to Brooklyn in about 1880, she continued teaching until at least 1888—some of it in Harpers Ferry and some in Hinton, West Virginia—though her teaching was sometimes interrupted by illness. She gave a public speech—probably tied to black education—in Talcott, West Virginia, in 1888; some members in her audience reportedly encouraged her to consider writing her autobiography.

Drumgoold moved back to Brooklyn in October of 1895, probably in large part because of family ties. She mentioned having siblings living in the Brooklyn area, and her mother continued to live in there until her death on 28 February 1898.

Drumgoold wrote A Slave Girl's Story between 1896 and 1898 and self-published it, probably with aid from friends, in 1898. Undoubtedly, some of Drumgoold's reasons for writing her narrative were economic; the narrative thus repeatedly praises Drumgoold's various white employers. Like many of the slave narratives of the 1890s, it offers a message of racial uplift, faith, and education. At times it is fairly unfocused, and so has received only limited attention from critics, most of whom concentrate on the separation and reunification of Drumgoold's family and Drumgoold's representations of her birth mother and her “white mother.” Nonetheless, her story offers a rare portrait of a former slave who moved between the highly urbanized environment of New York City and the rural South. Drumgoold seems to have turned again to domestic work during this period; however, she is listed in the 1900 federal census of Brooklyn as a teacher; she lived in the same building as her widowed, elder sister Ella S. Rodwell, who worked as a laundress and domestic. She seems to have attended the Hanson Place Methodist Episcopal Church during this period, but no record has surfaced of Drumgoold after 1900. Neither she nor her sister Ella appeared in the 1910 or 1920 census.

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